Earning Opportunities with Writing

This Hubpage website is one of the best-known sites where many writers and authors share their creative writings on any topic they feel passionate about. But does it have the potential to make a living with it? Personally, I say NO. This does not mean that it's impossible, some members probably do, but they have been freelance writers for many years. I personally feel that any author or writer can earn online through their writing, so long as they keep at it. So long as they never give up.

There are many ways to earn from writing online.

• Freelance blogging - This is someone who is paid for writing blog posts for his clients (can be individuals or companies).
• Write several ( at least 30) articles on one topic and then collate them into an ebook. That is another way to create a passive income from writing.
• Writing a novel by publishing each chapter as a post in itself with the intent to have this novel published as an ebook when finished.

There are many more ways I'm sure, but these are just a few ideas.

When I started to post articles on hubpages I was not even aware that you could earn money from the clicks. My aim was purely to find ways to network and market my own novels and to find out what works and what does not. As the creative director of Kima Global Publishers in Cape Town, my job entails helping our authors with the marketing of their books.

As publishers, we need to adjust to the huge changes in traditional publishing we are now experiencing through electronic ebooks and social networking opportunities now available

Hubpages are great networking sites all you need to add is your PayPal account and it takes very little time to network your articles.

Today every published author needs to have a blog, website and keeps marketing themselves through their writings, but lately, it's getting more and more difficult to use Hubpages as a promotion tool at the same time.

My partner wrote a great article with that topic. So I do not need to write more about it. Robin is so busy keeping Kima Global running that writing for HubPages is not high on his to-do list at the moment, but he soon hopes to add more hubs “From the Publisher's desks”.

My job has shifted from being Kima Global’s webmaster to becoming the marketing and networking director.

At first, I had to help new authors with setting up their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. Some authors are still not keen on that, but for a publisher, it’s almost impossible to promote an author that has no Google profile so to speak. for that reason we both wrote an ebook titled: Breakthrough Marketing at no Cost. that is a free download from our website.

When I discovered that I could write articles related to my research for my books and earn money for doing that, I thought I had found just what many of our authors needed, an incentive to write articles about their topic and have the opportunity to get paid for their efforts.

So far a few authors have signed up and one author – Roger Nichols is out of booth camp.

We are still a traditional publisher, but our print runs are a lot smaller compared to the years when we had a warehouse full of books in the USA! Here is the link to our blog where we give lots of practical advice for writers who want to become authors.

Before the internet became a household name we had to hold stocks in the USA in order to sell through wholesalers there, and also to supply Amazon. The cost of shipping our books to the warehouse space we rented, plus paying a manager to run the operation was horrendous. Today all our printed titles are available due to the print in-demand opportunities like Lightening Source and Create Space.

The world of publishing now offers a bewildering amount of choices, some of which will not lead to success and others are simply dangerous!

Between 1999 – 2009 we had our own booth at this, the biggest and most prestigious book fair to promote our Kima Global Publishing house in person. We started to sell foreign rights, but the cost far outreached the returns. We hoped that it would change if we kept coming, but in the year 2010 I happened to break both my feet, so we had to cancel our booth space and airline tickets. We never went back again in subsequent years. The positive side was that we had made good business contacts over the years and we became distributors for the African market of several USA and UK publishers.

We never regretted exhibiting at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but with the way things are now going in the book world globally, probably only the very large publishing houses can finance the cost of being seen at these book fairs.

The fact that we are still in business after several great financial losses mean that we have made the right business decisions. We focused on our local market and spent money updating our website.

The followers on my HubPages will have noticed that I add lots of self-created images. It takes a lot more work, but I can use them later on Pinterest.

How do I create the images?
After I’ve written an article for HubPages I divide my paragraphs and add a heading for each section, I look for the base image that I can use for the whole article.
This is often a photo of a high resolution. Then each image next to the paragraph needs to reflect the text in that section of my article. I then look in my large database for the right images. I have saved many photos and scanned images over a period of twelve years.

I add these clips into the folder of the article and start playing with layers in Photoshop.
If I want to use a recent image from Google, like a book cover or an item, I make sure these images are copyright free and only use a part of the image as transparency. That way the image becomes original and I can add my name to it.

I love the creativity of creating individual images for my articles. I have plenty of experience in Photoshop because I designed most of the Kima Global book covers so that acquired skill is now coming in handy.

Thanks for reading my own experiences with online writing.

Nadine

The below video was created after several of our authors were given the opportunity to talk about their book on a trade show.